“Oh, you’re wrong about that, querida,” he whispers through that smile, but the mirth quickly slips away. “I appointed myself after that morning.”
That morning. He’s talking about the morning after Jacob Knight meteored my life, the same morning I showed up with the news that I was fleeing Arcata—probably forever—in my junky sedan my father had packed to the brim. He’s talking about the morning I pushed my wolf down into a deep, dark hole within me—the morning I stopped trusting her.
“Just tell me this one thing,” he says, his voice turning to an enticing purr. Lifting his butt, he digs into his front jeans pocket and pulls out a Peanutty chocolate cup. Holding it before me, he shifts it from side to side. “Do those dudes have power over you?”
“Seriously, Mack? Bribing answers from me with candy? How old do you think I am?”
The fact that I’m tracking the yellow wrapper with my gaze completely contradicts my words, but I can’t really help it. Of the Peanutty family, Peanutty cups are my favorite. Out in the middle of nowhere as our town is, with trolls and earthquakes periodically waylaying supply trucks, Peanutty cups are as rare as phoenixes.
“Do they have power over you, Scar?” He punctuates the words with each swing of the candy.
Snatching it from his fingers, I sigh. “Yes and no.” That much, at the very least, I can admit. “Story is that Lance Knight can take any start-up company and turn it into a Fortune 500 faster than I can eat brownies.”
“Nothing is that fast,” Mack says, deadpan.
I roll my eyes as I tear open the wrapper on my prize. “He starts the businesses, and the other two do whatever they do to make the business successful. It’s as if they have the golden touch of King Midas.”
The image my wolf showed me of Lance’s hands wrapping around my thighs as he pumped into me explodes into my mind again, and I choke on my first bite of Peanutty.
What the hell?
Coughing, I finish with, “Anyway, they’re rich and powerful, but not directly over me.”
Mack sighs as he slows down to enter Eureka. “In other words, they’re the same kind of werewolves as the ones who made you flee for your life. Scarlet, let me take you back to New York...or anywhere else, I don’t care where. I’m not an idiot, I know something happened to make you run.”
My face goes blank, trying to shut down the few memories I have of that night. Mack must sense my withdrawal, and he grabs my hand in his, rubbing his thumb along my wrist in sweet, soothing circles to calm the turbulent emotions his words evoke. He’s trying to keep me in the present since he knows how easily I can get lost in the past.
“You won’t tell me why you suddenly took martial arts classes once we got to New York or why you ran back here and are now treating this like it’s a permanent move.”
“You didn’t have to come back here with me.”
He looks at me like I’ve just descended below the dumbest thing since his eldest sister, Mab, came into reality TV power on a show called My Fairytale Life. The thought of her show sends a little shudder through me. I hate to have these negative feelings about my best friend’s siblings—even though he famously has hundreds of them—but the show is like a fifty-minute commercial for sociopathy and disgusting wealth in a time where a lot of people can’t afford necessities like toothpaste with fluoride.
“Just tell me this isn’t like that time.” He catches my eyes with his, getting serious in a way we don’t ever get serious. His clear, sea blue eyes hold a level of concern he’s usually much better at masking. “Your reaction to those three guys in your office takes me back to that week we spent hurriedly driving across the country.” He pauses. “Scarlett, we left like criminals on the lam, like a vampire horde was on our asses.”
Shit. He really is worried about me. Those stupid Knight brothers are their very own Pandora’s Box. They just had to flip Mack’s overprotective switch.
It’s crazy how bad I want to share my entire life with him, but I’ve always had the feeling that knowing about the packs would put Mack in danger—either from his race or mine. It sometimes feels as if the only thing that keeps us alive is our ignorance. It’s just a feeling, a tightening of the gut when we get too close to revealing something, but rational or not, I won’t let anything hurt this wonderful man.
Not even me.
My phone lights up with a text from my dad, but before I can read it, it starts playing out “Fae Sex Addiction” with a glam shot of my sister Zeezee taking over my phone screen.
I answer with, “Are you in danger?”
“Yes, Scar, I am,” she says, but from the growly tone of her voice, I can tell she’s in Zeezee’s very own brand of trouble, not someone-just-kidnapped-her-and-she’s-calling-from-the-back-of-their-van kind of trouble.
“Okay, just wait one second,” I say.
Her voice goes lower as she barks, “Scar—”
I pull the phone from my ear and glance at my screen, thumbing over to my text messages. The message my father took ten minutes to write is so agonizing, I almost wish I was still waiting for a response.
Do nothing. Act normal. Don’t come here until Sunday dinner. I’ll take care of everything. Send a refusal to their rental applications through their secretaries.
“What?” Mack asks as he examines my face.
Another text appears on my phone, but it does nothing to make me feel better about the situation.
Your mother says to call her on this phone if you want to talk about your feelings. She dropped her phone in the toilet again. She says she loves you and knows how this may affect your emotions. She can come spend the night with you if you need. She’ll bring her airbed.
“Um…sorry, Mack,” I say, “it looks like I’ve been exiled from my parents’ house until Sunday.”
As today is Monday, that all kinds of sucks. Even though having my father take care of everything is what I’ve always insisted I wanted, when I reread the first text, his words smart my pride. “I’ll take care of everything.” It’s what I asked him to do—no, it’s what I forced him to do. My father lives a life he never asked for or wanted, day in and out, so no one would know the truth of what we did.
The ball of guilt I’ve held in my gut since I let my father take the fall for me grows just a little heavier. Yes, it was to save my life, but my guilt doesn’t seem to care. I’m not sure how much longer I can carry it without it exploding within me.
A crackle noise on my speaker wakes me from my dark thoughts, and I remember: Zeezee.
I lift the phone to my ear again when Mack pulls into the left lane and skids through an intersection on a yellow. I swear two of my tires leave the ground as he flips a bitch.
“Holy shit, Mack!” I call over.
“Why the hell are you ignoring me when I told you it was an emergency? What is wrong with you?” Zeezee yells into my ear.
“Zeezee, I’m here, sorry. What’s going on? Aren’t you at work?”
Please, let her be at work.
“Well,” she sighs. “Sort of.” Raking in an audible breath, she says all in a rush, “Oxonos, my manager, accused me of stealing from the register.”
I clench my jaw and say through my teeth, “Did you? Do they have proof? Did they call the police?”
“Fuck you. No,” she says, indignant, as if she hasn’t been let go twice before for this exact infraction.
“So, you’re fired?” I ask. My face falls into my free hand, and I just manage not to scream. What is with this day? Seriously.
“Well…no, that’s not exactly… okay, that was two days ago, and even though I didn’t steal the money—it was a lot of money, so I slept with him.”
A sudden headache pierces through my skull and starts to throb. By all accounts, werewolves shouldn’t have headaches, but Zeezee has yet again managed to accomplish the impossible.
“Please, please tell me he isn’t in the hospital or something like that, Zeezee.”
“He’s fine. Okay, so, I thought the part
ially shifted thing was just his kink—but he has a video of me, and he’s threatening to put them on a werewolf porn site if I don’t pay him a hundred thousand dollars.”
For a moment, I swear my forehead is splitting in two. “Well, do you have a hundred thousand dollars?”
“Seriously, Scar?”
“What do you want me to say? I love you, Zee, but shit. Call the human police. He is a human, right?”
The silence that follows says everything.
Fae.
It also now makes perfect sense what she wants from me—or more accurately, what this guy Oxonos wants from me.
“Where are you?” I manage to say, with only a trace of a growl in my voice.
“In his bathroom,” she says on a sigh, like she knows I’m already on my way to clean up her mess— again. “He lives in Cutten, on the cliff—I swear to you I tried to handle this myself, and I wasn’t going to involve you at all. That’s why I slept with him—because I didn’t want you to get mad at me.”
Zeezee logic: unfathomable as it is disastrous.
The moment I hang up the phone, I’m glaring across the console at Mack, only to find him smirking. He’s slowed down so much, he’s actually five miles under our fifty-five-mile speed limit. A car honks, holding down the horn, but Mack just keeps smirking. Pulling off to the shoulder as soon as we exit the Samoa bridge again, the car crunches over gravel, and we, once more, flip a bitch to head into Eureka.
“Mack,” I say, exasperated, as we pull back onto the bridge and over the cracked fields of dried mud of the waterless Eureka Bay. I poke my supposed-best-friend’s arm. “I’m so tired of this bullshit, you have to stop it.”
“Me?” He laughs. “I didn’t sleep with your sister and blackmail her with werewolf porn.” Obviously, he heard every word of our conversation and finds it extremely entertaining.
Of. Course.
“This is serious. There is absolutely nothing funny about this.”
My protestation that this situation isn’t funny seems to make the mischievous little fae smile on his lips dial up its wattage. “Okay,” he says through that same damn smile. “It wouldn’t be funny if it was any other person than your sister. But you do remember how Zeezee texted me non-stop until I changed my number. And we’ve both seen what she posts online.”
He has a relatively good point, but it still doesn’t address the real problem in my opinion. I get that my sister does really icky things to men that could have easily landed her in some serious trouble if she wasn’t the alpha’s daughter. In my opinion, a woman spamming with unsolicited dirty messages is just as messed up as if a man does it. But what this fae Oxonos is doing is a whole different banana.
“Mack,” I say, “Zeezee and porn aside—fae are using me to get to you, and that stinks.”
“First, Scar, this is mischief, not malice. I think we both know how I’d react if there were fae trying to harm you in any way. And second, maybe it’s time we get a little more involved in each other’s lives.”
Words dry in my mouth, and I stare forward, completely unsure of how to respond.
“Mack,” I whisper as I stare past the mud flats and toward the low lands and cliffs of Eureka city. “You know how much I love you, and I don’t want to reject you in any way...”
I trail off, knowing words can’t express really what his friendship means to me. Most days, something he does or says is the reason I wake up smiling. When something awesome or terrible happens, he’s the first person I think of calling. But do I want to dive deeper into the fae side of his life? Do I want him to be more involved in my life with the werewolf pack politics?
No.
Hell, no.
Strong, rough fingers rasp over mine, and I look over to find him still sporting that annoyingly impish grin. His smile might be mischievous, but as his fingers move to intertwine with mine, it feels more comforting than anything.
“We aren’t children anymore. Scar, you know I wouldn’t be saying this if I hadn’t already ensured I can protect you from the fae.”
Maybe. But I can’t protect him. Not after today. Not even close.
“Friendships change,” he whispers.
A sudden tingling thrill washes through me. I’m about to ask him what, exactly, he means, when I remember. Zane. Boyfriend. Bad, Scarlet.
“Shit,” I say. “Not only did I completely forget to call Zane, he is, at this moment, waiting for me to show up at the apartment to fix our plumbing.”
“Fix your...plumbing? You’ve got to be kidding, Scar. The man can’t plunge his own toilet?”
“It probably wasn’t the toilet. Leave Zane alone.”
Pulling my hand away, I call my boyfriend, realizing my horrible day has nowhere to go but downhill from here.
Chapter Eight
Scarlet
According to my mother, before the decade of storms, or the ten years that weather systems and seismic activity remade the Earth as she knew it, Eureka was a flat city. She said over the course of her infancy and childhood, the city cracked and fissured. Land sunk and rose every day during the near-constant massive earthquakes. Most citizens fled—though there weren’t many areas to flee to in that time—as new spitting volcanos rose constantly to the north, east, and south and storms made western sea travel impossible. The moment the seismic hotspot settled enough to give us only small, daily tremors, the population flowed back in. I almost can’t imagine the city without it being fractured into strange, jagged cliffs, like a perilous staircase for a giant. Ramps and bridges make the lower steps of the city accessible to everyone, while the higher steps are only accessible to their wealthiest of occupants.
Cutten is one of these.
Even though I try to keep my conversation with Zane short, just apologizing and telling him I’ll see him tonight, our tense conversation lasts the length of the city and up several of the Eureka steps. It starts with Zane asking me who’s driving. Wait, why am I with Mack? At this point, I remember I told Zane that Mack and I were hanging out, and a little bit of a suspicion rises in me as to why Zane tried to call me up to our apartment less than an hour before I was supposed to meet Mack and practice our dances. Our conversation devolves into mild accusations of emotional manipulation from there. Zane decides he'll call in sick where he works at the hospital so he can be sure to be home so we can “talk”—as a favor to me of course. The whole conversation leaves a bad taste in my mouth as I hang up.
“So how is Lame Zane doing?” Mack says as he slows at the foot of Cutten cliffs.
“He’s not lame,” I grumble as we disembark from my junky little sedan. When my boots are firmly on the dirt, I quietly thank the gods above that once again I didn’t end up entombed in a fiery inferno of a ten-car pile-up with Mack at the wheel.
“He wants you to account for every time you hang out with me.”
“No,” I object, but Mack only gives me a look.
“He has a stranglehold on you—has for the last two years.”
“That’s not true. We’re still working out dominance stuff between us. It takes a while with werewolf couples.” This argument is a familiar one—on all counts. I’m not giving up my relationship with Mack because of Zane’s insecurities, but I’m not going to discount Zane’s right to feel weird about my relationship with Mack either.
Up until we moved back to Arcata, Mack and I lived together, and we’re as affectionate as wolves—always have been, always will be. We cuddle, wrestle, and fall asleep entangled in each other’s arms. This would be totally A-OK and normal between friends within a pack, but Mack isn’t a wolf.
I get it.
Am I going to give in to Zane’s instinct to push me from Mack?
No.
But I also know it’s something I’m going to have to work out with anyone I mate with, and these things take time.
Mack and I hike to the base of the cliffs, finding a closed stone door in the sheer wall.
Looking up at the cliffside, I mumble, “He’s
been a little extra jealous of you lately, to be honest. I’m not sure if it’s because Zane and my relationship has always been conducted across the country and now our friendship is in his face—”
“We’ve been back for a year, Scar. But I have no doubt the lack of distance has changed everything. The dude isn’t free to cheat on you anymore. He has to toe the line.”
To lighten the mood, I roll my eyes, but I’m regretting that I decided to be so forthcoming on this subject. A strange tension has coiled through me at his words, but it’s not because he’s accusing my boyfriend of cheating on me—he’s said that one before, and I didn’t believe him then either. But for some reason, all Mack and my interactions in the last hour just feel like they hold weight, and I’m not sure I like it.
“Roll your eyes all you want, but if someone is insanely jealous all the time even though you’ve done nothing to earn it, they’re probably the cheater, Scar. Fact of life.”
I point into Mack’s face. “Whatever. Zane is a virgin—not that it’s any of your business. And I’m pretty sure I already told you that. Obviously, you don’t know Zane like I do.”
“Oh yes, I forgot. Zane is saving his virginity for your mating,” Mack says while looking up at the sky, as if it’s oh, so obvious Zane isn’t doing anything like that. “Scar, I can’t respect anyone who could aggressively stake a claim on a person who’s going through a hard time and then expect that person to put in all the effort.” To this, Mack raises his brows, daring me to contradict his argument.
I don’t give him the pleasure of debating what he said; instead, I give him a challenging look of my own. “I think one thing is crystal clear, Mack...you fae have all seen Lord of the Rings way too many times.” I wave at the door embedded in the cliff. “Are we supposed to know the secret password? Because we’ve been standing in front of this door for ten minutes and nothing has happened.”
He smirks, wrapping an arm around my shoulder, and the weird tension that had lodged in my chest finally dissipates.
Dirty Alphas Page 6
